Over the course of the six weeks, Healy and Liu will blog their
experiences for Sherdog.com. Today’s post comes from Liu.

Every fighter goes through a process of preparation for a fight.
For me, this training camp has been about meeting goals I never
thought I could achieve.

My entire fighting career has been fought at heavyweight. I started
the camp at 242 pounds with the goal of fighting at 205. It has
been no picnic, but after four weeks of intense training I am now
at 220 pounds and am able to see a change in not only my weight,
but in the way I see life. With two week left to go, I know that I
will not only make the weight, but I will win this fight. It’s like
there’s a whole other part of myself that I never knew existed.

This is not to say that things have been easy at all. I’ve thrown
up about eight times during this process just because of the
intensity of the training, but I never quit and my coaches, Brad
and Pat, never let me quit. They believe in me and I believe in
myself. We all stand together to win!

That is the other great thing I’ve learned in this process:
Enthusiasm is contagious. When we started this camp, there were 20
core students and about 60 others from the sanda team that were
involved. Then, from all over the country, students from other
teams came to join us. Fighters like Chengjie Wu,
Hailin
Ao and Wang Sai filled
the training facilities to capacity. It was like everyone was
coming together with one goal: to grow and to be a better martial
artist.

Every day, we pick each other up, encourage each other and push
each other to our limits. We have endured exhaustion, having to
unlearn years of techniques not suitable for MMA, and even staph
infection! But we keep fighting, keep moving forward. At one
practice, Baeter jumped up and began shouting, “Do you realize what
we have here? We have the opportunity every Chinese who ever wanted
to fight in MMA has! Elite level coaching and training in our own
home!” I have never seen him so excited.

When I step into the ring on Oct. 30, it will not only be the
weight that I have left behind, it will be the shadows of fear and
apathy I once held. When that bell rings, there will be a dragon
born of fire, hope, determination and skill, all wrapped up in a
beautiful, 205-pound package.